“Any daily work task that takes 5 minutes will cost over 20 hours a year, or over half of a work week. Even if it takes 20 hours to automate that daily 5 minute task, the automation will break even in a year.”
— Breaking into Information Security: Crafting a Custom Career Path to Get the Job You Really Want by Josh More, Anthony J Stieber, & Chris Liu
So far, we have created the UI Action to produce our Setup Properties button, configured the conditions under which the button would appear, and built the Business Rule to ensure that all properties created for an application are placed in a Systems Properties Category of the same name. Before we jump into the business of building out all of the things that we want to automate through the push of that button, there are just a couple of more little odds and ends that we will want to take care of first. One thing that will be helpful in maintaining System Properties for the application will be to have the properties listed out as Related Lists. That’s accomplished fairly easily by selecting Configure -> Related Lists from the hamburger menu on the main Application configuration page:
This will bring up the Available and Selected Related Lists for an Application, and you just need to find the System Property->Application entry in the Available bucket, highlight it, and then use the right arrow button to push it over into the Selected bucket. Oh, and don’t forget to click on that Save button once you’re done.
One other little thing that would be handy would be a link to the property admin page somewhere on the main Application configuration page. Even though our setup automation will be creating a link to that page somewhere on the main navigation menu, it would still be handy to have a link to that same page right here where we are configuring the app. The format of the URL for that link in both instances is the address of the page, plus a couple of parameters, one for the page title and the other for the name of the Category:
/system_properties_ui.do?sysparm_title=<appName> Properties&sysparm_category=<appName>
To build a link to that page on the main Application configuration page can be easily accomplished with another UI Action similar to the first UI Action that we built for our button, but this time we will select the Form link checkbox instead of the Form button checkbox. The code itself is just constructing the URL and then navigating to that location:
function openPage() {
var appname = document.getElementById('sys_app.name').value;
var url = '/system_properties_ui.do?sysparm_title=' + encodeURIComponent(appname) + '%20Properties&sysparm_category=' + encodeURIComponent(appname);
window.location.href = url;
}
There may be more elegant ways to do that, but this works, so that’s good enough for now. This link should show after the Application Properties have been configured, so the display rules are basically opposite of those for our button: the button will show until you use it and the link will only show after you use the button. We can pretty much steal the condition from other UI Action, then, and just flip the last portion that checks for the presence of the Category:
gs.getCurrentApplicationId() == current.sys_id && (new GlideRecord('sys_properties_category').get('name',current.name)) && (new GlideRecord('sys_properties_category_m2m').get('category.name',current.name))
Those of you who are paying close attention will notice that we also add yet one more check to our condition, and that was just to make sure that there was at least one System Property defined for the app. There is no point in bringing up the property value maintenance page if there aren’t any properties. Assuming that you have set up application properties and you have defined at least one property, you should see the new link appear down at the bottom of the main Application configuration page:
That should take care of all of those other little odds and ends … now all that is left is to build out the code that will handle all of those initial setup tasks. Last time, I said that we would take care of that here, but as it turns out, that that was a lie. We’ll have to take care of that next time.
